Land Use Competition

This introductory chapter explores the notion of ‘distal drivers’ in land use competition. Research has moved beyond proximate causes of land cover and land use change to focus on the underlying drivers of these dynamics. We discuss the framework of telecoupling within human–environment systems as a first step to come to terms with the increasingly distal nature of driving forces behind land use practices. We then expand the notion of distal as mainly a measure of Euclidian space to include temporal, social, and institutional dimensions. This understanding of distal widens our analytical scope for the analysis of land use competition as a distributed process to consider the role of knowledge and power, technology, and different temporalities within a relational or systemic analysis of practices of land use competition. We conclude by pointing toward the historical and social contingency of land use competition and by acknowledging that this contingency requires a methodological–analytical approach to dynamics that goes beyond linear cause–effect relationships. A critical component of future research will be a better understanding of different types of feedback processes reaching from biophysical feedback loops to feedback produced by individual or institutional reflexivity.

Exponential growth in oil palm land and palm oil production in Indonesia currently makes the country the world’s largest producer of this vegetable oil. Throughout its tumultuous political past from the 1960s until today, conditions were created which enabled the expansion of oil palm plantations. Under President Suharto’s “New Order,” territorialization processes were used to bring land and people under the control of an increasingly powerful central government. Plantations were instrumental in this regard and additionally formed the basis for the production of palm oil as an important export commodity in the opening of the Indonesian economy. In the wake of the 1997/1998 Asian economic crisis and with the end of Suharto’s rule, Indonesia entered a period of reform marked by decentralization and reterritorialization processes. Oil palm plantations continued to grow as foreign investment and plantation ownership by private businesses became increasingly relevant. Throughout both of these periods, the land-use decisions, which fostered the expansion of oil palm plantations, were not made by the people on the ground, but at a spatial, temporal, and functional “distance.” While distal drivers strongly shaped the development of land use, the consequences of these changes had little impact on the drivers. As plantations expanded farther into territories already claimed for other forms of land use (e.g., rainforest, subsistence agriculture land, indigenous land), they were increasingly likely to confront competing claims to land. Under the perceived greater political freedom of the reform period, the competing claims more often triggered conflicts, which, however, had limited bearing on these distal drivers.

The Dry Chaco in Argentina is among the most dynamic deforestation frontiers in South America. Land-use competition in this region today mainly relates to trade-offs between on the one hand ecosystem services important for local communities (e.g., fuelwood, forage, hunting, subsistence farming) and on the other side global demands for both agricultural commodities (e.g., soybean, beef) and conservation (e.g., of carbon stocks or biodiversity). Over the last four decades, land-use competition in the Dry Chaco has shifted from the local/market mode to the national/politic mode and recently to a global scale under a combination of political and market mode. Different actors and sectors try to shape land-use competition by shifting it onto a scale and into a mode more favorable for their own objectives. On the one hand, the agribusiness sector and provincial governments alike try to conserve land-use competition playing out at local-to-regional scale, with little regulation, and under market forces. On the other hand, local communities (indigenous communities and traditional small-scale farmer cattle ranchers) as well as regional NGOs try to shift land-use competition to the national and even global level. Associated with the upscaling of the competition process, new actors have emerged and become incorporated into land-use competition processes in the Dry Chaco. The national government takes on the role of a mediator to resolve conflicts, but also to create new framework conditions and legislation (most importantly a national Forest Law) for regulating land-use competition. The global community joins land-use competition by adding new options for land use (e.g., carbon stocks, conservation) and by market mechanisms that feedback on producers (e.g., sustainable or green labels). Distal drivers related to agricultural commodity trade, initially, promoted asymmetries in favor of the agribusiness sector. However, in the long run, distal drivers may also act to partially counterbalance the original asymmetries and to result in more balanced outcomes between the often conflicting aspiration of the actors involved in land-use competition in the Dry Chaco of Argentina.

The region of the Mekong River Delta is the most important rice-producing region in Vietnam. Changes in global rice market demands combined with the Vietnamese state’s interest in the economic development of its rural areas are currently influencing agricultural production practices in the region. With a lead farmer in the settlement of Truong Thang, Tam, as the key figure, this chapter investigates what happens when local rice farmers are encouraged to adopt a new production model and internationally recognized “good agricultural practices” (GAPs) in order to become part of a global high-value rice production network. The aim of this chapter was to emphasize some of the local processes of change that are part of a larger regional transformation process with the potential to change the dynamics of the global rice market. For the farmers, the production of GAP-certified high-value rice intended for export markets is radically different from what they are used to. It necessitates a new kind of knowledge, a new organization of production, new time cycles, a new distribution of responsibility, and the formation of new relations between people in their settlements. The analysis of this chapter is based on empirical fieldwork conducted in the Truong Thang settlement in Can Tho Province of the Mekong River Delta region. Based on this work, the key argument of the chapter is that the conversion of production practices that is currently taking place is not a simple case of local adaption to an international demand. Rather, it is a complex process of reconfiguration of societal and territorial embeddedness as the conversion of production practices is necessarily entangled with settlement and household spaces. The conversion of practices essentially relies on local processes of negotiation, on the entrepreneurship of individuals, and on the willingness and ability of farmers to internalize new values, i.e., perform the change.

While remote sensing images provide unprecedented abundance of earth observation data from both optical and radar perspectives, on a satellite or airborne platform, from plot to global scale, identifying and modeling drivers of land cover and land use change remains a huge challenge. This challenge is aggravated by the merging of distal drivers, which play an increasingly important and complex role in altering local land cover and land use change. Distal drivers, in the form of global markets, NGOs, international governments, and institutions, significantly contribute to shaping the landscape of central African states—the focus of this chapter—by controlling capital, information, knowledge flow, and international development initiatives. In this chapter, I will explore the applications and constraints of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) in capturing distal drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the Beira corridor, Manica, Mozambique. I investigate how this analysis fits into the conceptual and methodological framework of distal drivers. In Beira corridor, it is primarily the scarcity and uneven distribution of forest resources shaping land use competition in woodland areas. This competition is intensified by dramatic population increases, demands from remote markets, and conflicts of interest between local government and international organizations to preserve or develop certain forests and not others. Remote sensing images can capture the patterns of land use change as ‘balanced’ results of different land uses within a geographic area with time, which reflects the respective outcomes of competition between these different land use activity types. Examples explain drivers can be connected to their spatial patterns by combining regional biomass change maps derived from optical and radar remote sensing imagery, and knowledge of local deforestation and degradation processes. Moreover, we discuss the biases and uncertainties that result from processing RS images, as well as interpolating land use maps from RS images. I conclude with a brief discussion of the biases and uncertainties that may affect our perception of land use change, and how maps and their attributes themselves may feedback into land use competition.

Natural forests are being lost at unsustainable rates as frontiers of development advance and global demand for natural resources increases. This chapter examines two challenges to tropical forest conservation—the demand for use of land for multiple and continuous spatially and temporally linked purposes, and the gaps in our knowledge to fully understand and characterize resulting land cover change dynamics. This chapter uses the case of the biodiversity hot spot of Madre de Dios in Peru as an example. Here, land-use competition is largely resultant from mutually exclusive activities of Brazil nut harvesting, which depends on intact primary forest, development through construction of the Interoceanic Highway and legal and illegal mining of gold. The analysis compares areas with authorized land-use allocations against remotely sensed satellite data to identify past land cover change events and areas of potential land-use competition and conflict. Based on the case study, this chapter illustrates the increasing importance of distal and transnational commodity demands as a driver for land-use change. Further, it discusses the advantages and caveats of spatially and temporally explicit quantification of change using remote sensing techniques. For the latter, it focusses on issues of simplicity and system boundary definitions that may overlook relevant connections to distal drivers and forest/non-forest functions. This chapter concludes that teleconnected systems that drive local land-use and land cover change (LULCC) must be accounted for when mapping land disturbance dynamics, and discusses the potential paths that remote sensing analysis may take to understand and address these challenges.

In this chapter, we define, conceptualize, and exemplify competition for ecosystem services derived from land. Competition for land-based ecosystem services arises when utilization of an ecosystem service by one actor reduces the possibility of other actors to use the same or other ecosystem services. Therefore, we focus on trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services and argue that the functional relationships between the trade-offs are crucial in shaping how land-use competition plays out. We use this conceptualization of competition for land-based ecosystem services as well as the closely related concepts of trade-off and synergies as a framework to interpret the five case studies in this section, which provide a unique and rich overview of land-use competition in terms of actors involved, geographic coverage, spatial scale, and ecosystem services. These studies convey important insights into opportunities and challenges of intervening into competition for land-based resources and can inform efforts to improve land governance.

This case study analyzes a land conflict in Loliondo, an area adjacent to the eastern border of the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. The pastoralists of the area and a Dubai-based hunting company are competing over a strip of land of ~135,000 ha alongside the Serengeti. At the same time, the Tanzanian government claims the land in order to conserve the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem. The government intends to allocate the strip of land solely for nature conservation and hunting by excluding pastoralism. This chapter argues that the competition between the pastoralists and the hunting company is one over land-based ecosystem services. The intention of the government to allocate the contested strip of land to nature conservation and hunting only has fostered the competition, which has evolved into a conflict. It is shown that pastoralists are able to derive specific provisioning ecosystem services from the contested land also during the dry season. This makes the area most valuable for the food security of the pastoralists of the area, which will be destabilized by the current policies of the government.

The collapse of the Russian livestock sector triggered widespread agricultural land abandonment in post-Soviet Russia. The beef industry declined in particular, and consequently, Russia became heavily dependent on beef imports, from Europe in the 1990s and from Brazil after 2002. Therefore, Russian demand substantially contributed to the growth of the Brazilian beef sector and fostered widespread agricultural land expansion and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The beef trade from Brazil to Russia was associated with substantial environmental costs in terms of carbon emissions and loss of biodiversity. While the abandoned agricultural land in Russia has become an important terrestrial carbon sink that would be largely diminished by re-cultivation, we argue that increasing agricultural output through re-cultivation or the expansion of grazing within Russia may be desirable from a global perspective, if the high environmental costs of production elsewhere are taken into account.

Afforestation projects are viewed as potentially effective measures for carbon sequestration and therefore climate change mitigation. Increasing demands for bioenergy products also require land for woodland plantations. Much of the land in temperate regions suitable for afforestation is used for agriculture and consequently afforestation of farmland is frequently proposed. Land owners are commonly reluctant to sacrifice fertile land for purposes other than food and feed production. In Scotland’s uplands, grazed pastures are a common land use that could be put under pressure by demands for woodland planting. This chapter explores how farm woodland planting for carbon sequestration and biofuel production affects livestock output. Sheep productivity, soil carbon and tree biomass data from a hill farm in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, are used to estimate the carbon balance and agricultural output of farm woodland plots and silvopastoral systems. The conceptual ideas of trade-off curves are illustrated with the example of ‘trees versus sheep’. Planting trees on pastureland can have varying impact on sheep depending on density and planting system. Within the concepts of trade-offs and synergies, it is furthermore discussed whether agroforestry systems such as silvopasture can ameliorate trade-offs between woodland and agriculture by enhancing agricultural productivity while also providing carbon benefits. The concepts presented show that there is great potential for integrating agriculture and forestry to achieve environmental benefits without compromising productivity.

As land is a limited resource, diverging demands drive competition between land uses. The pressure on arable land is increasing. In Germany, about 80 ha of arable land are converted daily (2009–2012), mainly to housing and transport uses. A small portion is also lost each year to reforestation and to ecological compensation measures. The boom in biomass production for energetic purposes in particular is serving to heighten the pressure on arable land and is increasingly competing for land with food and feed production. Over the last decade, the demand for woodfuel has also increased remarkably. Germany aims to cover 14 % of its heat demand with renewable energy by the year 2020, with wood to play a leading role. To meet this target, novel systems of land use will need to be added to the current land use spectrum in order to increase the wood supply. The cultivation of fast-growing trees, such as poplar and willow, represents one means to address the increasing demand while, at the same time, fostering the provision of a range of beneficial ecosystem services. Systems that mix annual crop production and fast-growing trees on the same site constitute an especially promising pathway to achieve synergies between different land use types and to reduce land use competition. This chapter explores the benefits, potentials, limitations and challenges of cropping systems using fast-growing trees in Germany. Special emphasis is placed on the capacity of agroforestry systems to mitigate land use competition by combining wood with food production and conservation on the same plot. Trade-offs and synergies with ecosystem services such as food production, aesthetic values and other regulating and supporting services are discussed at different spatial and temporal scales. Finally, some conclusions for sustainable land management are drawn.

The dry forests of the Chaco in South America are under great land conversion pressure, mostly for establishing pastures and soybean fields. Taking recent estimates into account, the rates at which forests are disappearing are similar to those of the Amazon, but compared to the Amazon, the Chaco remains fairly understudied. The land transformations during the past decades went along with a substantial change in the type of actors dominating the Chaco landscape. In this chapter, we discuss the land changes in the Chaco during the past 30 years with emphasis on the actors driving these changes, as outlined in the conceptual chapter of this book section. In the Chaco, it appears that the competition over land is a competition in which the actors are endowed with varying degrees of power, resulting in highly unbalanced competition. This chapter highlights these differences and discusses the potential role of the state as an actor in the competition for land that may help to slow down deforestation in the area and guide the Chaco toward more sustainable land-use futures.

In land system science, the issue of land use competition is often explored in the context of future scenarios of the agro-food system. While land system science shares its research topic with the so-called agro-food studies, there is little communication between these two strands of research. In order to explore the reasons for this communicative divide and how it could be bridged, we first critically examine the ontological foundations of futures studies in land system science, arguing that they (a) tend to have a global and remote, rather than a place-specific perspective, (b) typically consider biophysical constraints via according models and (c) build on an “economistic” understanding of social relations, insofar as complex social relations are represented by an economic model. This makes it difficult to relate the futures studies from land system science to the mostly place-specific, participatory and social science-based perspective that agro-food studies provide. Still, we conclude that while land system science could benefit from a more place-specific and social science perspective, agro-food studies could profit from translating biophysical considerations and scenario thinking into a place-specific and participatory perspective. The chapters in this section show some fruitful approaches, which take up a place-specific perspective, without losing the sight of biophysical constraints as well as cross-scalar interactions.

With an agricultural system that is approaching its natural limits and a global rise in obesity and associated diseases, it is vital to consider human health as a primary driver for future food production. Foodshed analysis is used to analyze the origins of food for a particular region and to assess the implications for environmental sustainability. This case study uses the concept of a foodshed to analyze the land area needed to supply the UK with fruit and vegetables, critical components of a healthy diet, over the period 1986–2009, and incites a critical reflection on how to achieve healthy and environmentally sustainable food. The results show that the ‘Fruit and Veg’ foodshed of the UK has increased over the studied period and that particularly vegetables are increasingly sourced from abroad, suggesting that the UK is increasingly reliant on other countries to satisfy its recommended nutritional needs. Most important ‘external’ cropland suppliers are Spain, China, and Italy, together contributing over 30 % of total land area for fruit and vegetables abroad. To better understand trade-offs and synergies between land use, health, and food consumption, it is imperative to include land use as indicator in the context of sustainable diets. A major challenge will be how to achieve a shift in consumption toward less land-intensive patterns, without neglecting socioeconomic issues such as social justice. The alignment of nutritional and agricultural policies is urgently needed as it has the potential of tackling several global challenges simultaneously.

Cities and agriculture are fundamentally linked, yet often coevolve in a contradicting manner. On the one hand, many scholars in science and urban planning argue in favor of satisfying urban food demands through local and regional agricultural production. On the other hand, as the process of urbanization occurs, competition between agricultural and non-agricultural land use is intensifying, more often than not to the disadvantage of agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas. In order to be part of sustainable land use in an urbanizing society, studies suggest that agriculture needs to become increasingly multifunctional. However, the interplay of multifunctional agriculture (MFA), food supply systems, and urban areas is not fully understood and requires more attention. Against this background, this chapter explores the potential of MFA within short food supply chains in peri-urban areas. In particular, MFA is seen as a resource for strengthening urban agriculture and city region food systems as a sustainable development. Based on a local case study in Berlin (CSA SpeiseGut), this chapter examines innovative practices and strategies at farm level that foster multifunctionality in community-supported agriculture (CSA). The case study illustrates how multiple functions such as producing local food (production goal), delivering amenities for urban lifestyles (consumption goal), and protecting ecosystem benefits (protection goal) emerged and how they contribute to a city region food system. The chapter reveals that peri-urban farming can indeed become an integrative land-use option when developing synergies between MFA and short food supply chains. In particular, MFA can stimulate the creation of new food networks, which strengthen urban agriculture and city region food systems.

Brazil has become one of the largest exporting countries of soya, sugarcane, maize, oranges and coffee for the global market. The export-oriented agribusiness model is embedded into a neo-extractivist development model, where state revenues are largely based on exports of primary products from agriculture and mining. While export crops are mainly produced by large-scale agribusiness, traditional staple crops such as cassava, rice or beans, which still provide an important contribution to the diets of Brazilians, continue to be produced by small-scale family farming. The concurrence of both farming modes and the commodification of new land for the production of export crops potentially lead to competition for resources and markets, thus reinforcing the strong inequality in landownership in Brazil. Based on arguments from the scientific literature and empirical data, I explore this potentially competitive process, based on land-use expansion patterns for soya and sugarcane (agribusiness), and cassava and beans (family farming). While processes of competition cannot be directly inferred from this analysis, it provides insights into hot spots of dynamic changes in land use and informs local case studies, which are required to deepen the understanding of possible land-use competition.

The creation and maintenance of local food sovereignty and security is a top priority on political agendas. Food systems are characterized by complex dynamic nexuses at different levels and scales, and sustainability assessments necessarily need to approach social, economic, and environmental dimensions. While the provision of food is limited, among other factors, by the quantity of fertile areas, these areas are also attractive for other land uses, e.g., for the cultivation of energy plants or afforestation, which can result in socioeconomic conflicts related to land-use competition. Numerous studies have looked at the global picture, using integrated assessment models, in which biophysical and economic models are coupled to derive potential future pathways and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of feeding and fueling the rising global population. While such models can be useful to show global boundary conditions, their representation of complex local-to-global interdependencies is necessarily limited. Looking at local structures, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to analyze a product supply chain and gain detailed insights in order to provide apparently complex data in a simple way for detecting option spaces or informing civic societies. This chapter addresses the local food system of Vienna. It shows what we can learn from LCA about, for example, potential savings of food-related GHG emissions and about gaining efficiencies of local produce in contrast to imports from the international market.

This chapter reflects on land competition from a water perspective. Conceptual thoughts are enriched with evidence drawn from case studies as well as other published studies about both land and water. At the same time, it lays down an analytical framework for these case studies. Starting with a discussion of the inherent relationship between land and water, we explore recent disconnects in land and water studies that make it difficult to collate empirical evidence and comprehensive understanding of how competition between water and land are inherently linked. For us the term competition refers to gaining access to or control over—either land or water—and thus simultaneously captures social and material dimensions. To address these linkages, we employ the concept of waterscapes. One way of seeing waterscapes is through the lens of the competition that occurs at specific places, in various positions and on/across various scales, thereby capturing a combined view of land and water. The notion of waterscapes is mainly used by scholars from the fields of political ecology and critical geography thinking to explore how power is wielded, and in determining when and where who or what gets how much water/land. We briefly review the different notions of competition in disconnected literature concerning land and water in order to instil a further analytical dimension: whilst the term “competition” is increasingly used in land change science to refer to the global rush for land, water scholars refer rather to the various means of water governance.

In Greater Accra, Ghana, pressures on formerly undeveloped land increase with rising demand for land as a resource for housing development. Land–water interactions create a waterscape inflicted by risk: ongoing development negatively impacts downstream communities as it reduces the natural capacity of local wetlands to regulate high discharge levels and eventually leads to flooding. The absence of water and sanitation infrastructure exacerbates flood-related risks, and the conversion of land surface changes ecosystem functions, which further contributes to flooding and water pollution. The purpose of this contribution is to explore material and spatial socionatural land–water interactions that are shaping the Densu Delta waterscape. Dynamics in space in the waterscape are explored through the lens of competition over land- and water-use control at different sites along the flow of the lower Densu Delta. In the case study area, urban development is both a cause of flood risk and a driver of risk reduction. As well-off areas gradually become served with basic infrastructure, less affluent communities along the road also experience less flooding and improved access to coping strategies. Competition over access to land thus often becomes a struggle over infrastructure. As a result of these ongoing processes, the nature of competition over land and water (use) is constantly changing in space, time and scale. Both land and water are unstable, fluid resources. The results show that competition between actors over the ownership of land is played out at a local level, between traditional authorities and individuals. Competition over the use of land by contrast is played out between local interest groups interested in further development on the one hand and, on the other hand, governmental authorities at city and national level intending to preserve the land from being developed. International interests including ecosystem conservation, investment in land for development and industrial production mediate the competition over both land and the use of water.

In Ethiopia, urban water supply and irrigation are competing for water resources. The Millennium Development Goals have spurred large donor investment in water supply resulting in a rapid increase in coverage for health and human development. At the same time, most of Ethiopia’s population is engaged in low-productivity rainfed agriculture and the government has made smallholder irrigation an investment priority for food security and poverty alleviation. In areas where water is physically scarce, there is fierce competition between water supply and irrigation resulting in unsustainable abstraction from common pool water resources. In the Haramaya watershed in Eastern Ethiopia, this has resulted in the severe depletion of Haramaya Lake, once an important water source for urban water supply for the historical town of Harar. Unregulated smallholder irrigation has expanded significantly and has displaced the urban water supply to over 72 km away. Water developments have been influenced by land-use change, international, national and local institutions and biophysical changes in the watershed. This chapter employs the nascent concept of the waterscape in order to explore how competition for water resources plays a role in the mediation of land-use change and vice versa.

Between 1847 and 1857 engineering students under the civil engineer and architect, Josef Stummer (1808–1891) created a rich cartographic and written description of Wien River, the largest tributary of the Viennese Danube. The highly dynamic flow regime, the riverbed and shores are described as intensively used in manifold ways by different actors. Townspeople used the water’s energy to drive mills and for production processes such as dyeing works, tanneries and laundries. Others extracted gravel from the riverbed or dried laundry on the shores, people grew vegetables and animals grazed. While the city grew along the shores of the river, water and land uses were still influenced by old manorial regulations. The river itself, with its natural dynamic change between periods of water scarcity and torrential floods, had an important bearing on the possible uses. In the 1850s, Wien River valley was a waterscape on the verge of change from an agrarian to an industrial socio-metabolic regime. Only a few years after the engineers had conducted their survey, the mill creeks were abandoned. 40 years later city authorities intervened with extensive regulation and constructed a railway line in the riverbed. We use Stummer’s material to tell an environmental history of competition over water and land in the Wien River waterscape during this transitional period.